The present invention relates to a network system, a distributed processing method and an information processing apparatus by which a process can be performed in a distributed manner by a number of information processing apparatus connected to each other by a network.
Recently, attention is paid to grid computing. The grid computing is a technique which implements a high arithmetic operation performance through cooperative operation of a number of information processing apparatus connected to each other by a network. Relating techniques are disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-342165 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Document 1), Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-351850 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Document 2), Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-358289 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Document 3), Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-366533 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Document 4), and Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-366534 (hereinafter referred to Patent document 5).
In the known techniques, a sub-processor in an information processing apparatus can access data in a main memory not only of the information processing apparatus but also of a different information processing apparatus to read out data into a local storage for exclusive use for the sub-processor and perform processing. Further, since a software cell can be used to transmit the body of a program and data between the information processing apparatus, when it is desired to cause an application to be processed in a fixed period of time, it is possible to transmit the application program to a required number of sub-processors in advance and then transmit data so that the processing may be performed in a distributed manner by the sub-processors.
Usually, however, the communication speed between information processing apparatus varies incessantly depending upon the congestion situation of the network, the use situation of hardware resources in the individual information processing apparatus and so forth. Therefore, only if those information processing apparatus which should be used to execute an application are specified taking only the specifications of available hardware resources into consideration, there is the possibility that a situation may occur that the application demanded to complete the processing in a fixed period of time cannot be processed in the fixed period of time.